by Mike Dash
With Wiebbe to rally and cajole them, the soldiers fashioned pikes from planks, tipping them with wicked sixteen-inch-long nails that had washed ashore with driftwood from the wreck. Like the mutineers, they improvised morning stars, and though swords and muskets were still lacking, there were plenty of fist-sized lumps of coral around, which could be hurled at the heads of any attackers. There is even a reference to the fact that “guns” were assembled on the island. What these were remains a mystery, but, supplied with rope, the soldiers could perhaps have cut branches from the stunted trees that dot the interior and turned them into catapults for larger rocks.
While the soldiers worked, Hayes selected his defensive positions. He recognized that the geography of the archipelago and the pattern of the shallows meant that the mutineers would have to approach his island across the mudflats that guarded the whole southern shoreline. This limited the risk of a surprise attack. A lookout post built midway along the coast, at the apex of a bay, provided him with a forward base and a clear field of observation. With sentries posted at intervals along the coast, it would have made sense to position the bulk of his troops farther inland, close to the wells, where they could rest and feel relatively secure.
With the arrival of the last party of refugees, Hayes found himself in command of 46 men and a boy. Collectively, these Defenders, as they now became known, gave him a significant numerical superiority over the mutineers that offset, at least in part, the inferiority of his weapons. The best troops included a group of Dutch and German soldiers, and Hayes had his two cadets, Allert Jansz and Otto Smit, to help command them. These men could probably be depended on, but the ranks of the Defenders also included a party of half a dozen French troops whose loyalty to the VOC, and thus general reliability, was perhaps more suspect. The balance of Hayes’s men were gunners, sailors, and civilians of limited military experience. It was impossible to say how well these men would fare in the face of a determined attack by well-armed mutineers.
Nevertheless, with his preparations complete, Hayes may have felt a certain optimism. He had numbers on his side; he could hardly be surprised; and his Defenders were well fed and well supplied with water. Morale was relatively high. He and his men also had sheer desperation on their side. It was only too plain, from the descriptions of the refugees, that Cornelisz would come, and that he would kill them all if given the chance. Surrender, even a negotiated peace, were hardly options. They would fight, when they fought, to the death.
Wiebbe Hayes was a competent soldier and a good leader. It was the Defenders’ good fortune that Jeronimus Cornelisz was neither. The captain-general had no military experience and, it would appear, little grasp of strategy. As soon as it emerged that Hayes and his men were still alive, Cornelisz must have known that they would have to be dealt with, for fear that they would alert a rescue ship. Yet it was not until the last week of July that Jeronimus resolved to move against them. By then Wiebbe had had at least two weeks to make his preparations; he and his men were a much more formidable enemy than they might have been a fortnight earlier.
Perhaps Cornelisz understood this. Probably he had become aware that the Defenders outnumbered the mutineers, and certainly he recognized the difficulty of launching an assault without the advantage of surprise. For these reasons the captain-general decided to begin his campaign by exploiting the well-known antipathy between the soldiers and the sailors of the VOC in order to divide Hayes’s party.
He wrote a letter, warning of treachery. The sailors on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, Jeronimus alleged, had plotted to betray their comrades. “They have in their possession (unknown to you) a Compass, in order to go thus secretly with the little skiff to the High land.*42” To “maintain justice, and punish the evil-doers,” he urged the soldiers to hand over all the sailors on the island for punishment: “Give to our hands Lucas the steward’s mate, Cornelis the fat trumpeter, Cornelis the assistant, deaf Jan Michielsz, Ariaen the gunner, squinting Hendrick, Theunis Claasz, Cornelis Helmigs and other sailors who are with Your Hons.”*43 If they would also return a boat—the one Aris Jansz had taken during his escape from Batavia’s Graveyard a few days earlier—the apothecary added, the soldiers and the mutineers could still be the very “greatest and truest brothers and friends”—and, indeed, look forward to enjoying “still more bonds and mateships.”
In composing this devious epistle, Cornelisz displayed his absolute conviction that his actions in the Abrolhos were not only justified, but sanctioned by law. He wrote as the head of the ship’s council, and apparently in the hope, if not the expectation, that his orders would be obeyed. He explained that the refugees who had saved their lives by fleeing to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island were in fact “evil-doers who deserved death on account of mutiny,” and he even commented on the “particular liking and trust” he had for Hayes himself. This was more than the self-delusion he had shown in wooing Creesje Jans. The letter was a product of Jeronimus’s certainty that he was the legally ordained leader of all the Batavia survivors and the conviction that his actions were inspired by God.
As his emissary, Jeronimus chose Daniel Cornelissen, the young cadet who had helped to drown several of the first victims of the mutiny. On 23 July the youth was rowed to Hayes’s Island, where he somehow made contact with the half dozen French soldiers among the Defenders. These men had been selected as the letter’s addressees, apparently in the hope that they would be better swayed by Cornelisz’s mendacity than the Dutch. But even the Frenchmen did not believe in the mutineers’ sincerity, and rather than receiving Cornelissen as an ambassador, they seized him and took him captive. The cadet was bound and brought to Hayes, who confiscated the letter and imprisoned him.
False diplomacy had failed. Now Jeronimus tried violence. Two or three days after Daniel Cornelissen’s disappearance, during the last week of July, Zevanck and Van Huyssen gathered 20 men and attempted to subdue Wiebbe by force. As Hayes had calculated, the mutineers’ boats were spotted while they were still well out to sea, and their crews had to slip and stumble their way across seaweed-strewn mudflats to reach the shore. The Defenders came to meet them with their homemade weapons, and there was some sort of encounter on the beach. Exactly what occurred was not recorded, but it appears that the mutineers’ reconnaissance was unsuccessful. Zevanck and Van Huyssen may have been surprised to meet with concerted resistance from a group of well-fed, well-armed men; in any case, they withdrew before either side could inflict casualties on the other, and scrambled back to their own camp to gather reinforcements. Taken by surprise themselves, they needed new ideas and a fresh approach. Unfortunately, they had neither.
Zevanck and Van Huyssen returned to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island on 5 August. On this occasion they brought with them their entire gang, but they had not improved their tactics. Once again the men from Batavia’s Graveyard made a long drawn-out approach across the mud; once again the Defenders were prepared for them. Hayes’s troops met the mutineers in the shallows, “up to their knees in water,” and prevented them from reaching land. The mutineers showed no more stomach for a fight than they had the previous week; again there were no casualties on either side. The second assault on Hayes’s Island was as unsuccessful as the first.
After that the captain-general made no more attacks on the Defenders for a while, and the civil war in the Abrolhos lapsed into an uneasy truce, which lasted for the best part of a month. A few of the Defenders had family on Batavia’s Graveyard, but Wiebbe Hayes showed no inclination to counterattack Cornelisz’s men, and in retrospect his caution seems perfectly justified; secure though they were in their well-prepared positions, Hayes’s troops would have been badly exposed to Jeronimus’s swords and pikes in more open fighting. For their part, the mutineers now knew that they could not inflict serious casualties on Wiebbe’s men without taking greater risks themselves. Some sort of new plan was evidently required.
The problem became urgent at the end of August, for time had turned against the mutineers. Each passing day incr
eased the risk of the long-awaited rescue ship appearing, and as the wet season in the Abrolhos neared its end, their supplies of water dwindled. The more impulsive members of the captain-general’s gang—Van Huyssen and Andries Liebent among them—grumbled at the strict rationing they were expected to endure; they knew by now that the Defenders had abundant food and drink and declared that they would rather fight to take Wiebbe’s island than live in increasing misery on their own.
Under pressure to take action, Jeronimus himself began to plan a third attempt to ambush Hayes. Manipulative by nature, the captain-general greatly preferred deceit to frontal assaults. Rather than launch a third attack, he conceived the idea of a bogus offer of peace—“to come to an accord with them, in order, under the cloak of friendship, to surprise them by treason at an opportune time.” He would go, he said, to Wiebbe’s island bearing gifts.
Cornelisz’s scheme was more subtle than those of Van Huyssen and Zevanck, but hardly well thought out. He knew that Hayes’s troops required blankets and fresh clothing—after three months in the islands, their shirts and breeches were torn and dirty, and their shoes, which had been cut to pieces on the coral, had been replaced with rough clogs carved from planks of driftwood—while his men needed fresh water. There was cloth to spare on Batavia’s Graveyard, and he hoped that Wiebbe might exchange fresh meat and water for clothing and red wine. A parlay on the beach would give his men the chance to talk to the Defenders, sow seeds of dissension, and then, perhaps, persuade some of them to come over to the mutineers, “under cover, as friends, in order to help murder the others”; but Jeronimus never explained how the mutineers were to bribe their counterparts, or arrange a betrayal without Wiebbe realizing what was going on. Cornelisz’s cunning had once been an asset to the mutineers but now his inability to think things through, coupled with an invincible belief in his own rightness, would cost them dearly.
The parlay took place on 2 September. The day before, Gijsbert Bastiaensz had been sent to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with proposals for a peace treaty. The Defenders had received him kindly and expressed guarded interest in the plan; a time had been agreed for negotiations to take place. Now Jeronimus assembled his entire company—37 men and all their women—on a small islet opposite the Defenders’ main position and about 400 yards away across the mudflats. That done, he crossed to Hayes’s Island with only a small group of his most trusted lieutenants, leaving the remainder of the mutineers behind him.
What persuaded Cornelisz to take such an insane risk? The overtures that had been made on 1 September seemed to have been positively received, and the captain-general was confident that Wiebbe and his men were genuinely desperate for the clothing. He had returned from the reconnaissance of the previous day “saying joyfully to his folk that they now quite certainly had those [people] surely in his hands.” Possibly he was also convinced, by the ragged appearance of Hayes’s troops, that the Defenders were not much of a threat. But knowing Jeronimus, it seems likely that he was also fatally overconfident. The captain-general had complete faith in his own powers of persuasion and perhaps did not understand that the loyalists mistrusted every word he said. Having seen Zevanck and Van Huyssen fail to overwhelm Hayes by force, it may have seemed to him that he was teaching his companions a lesson in how to handle malcontents. And, of course, he retained the absolute conviction that his God was protecting him.
Cornelisz arrived on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island with a bodyguard of five: David Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, Gsbert van Welderen, Wouter Loos, and Cornelis Pietersz. His men struck the Defenders as “very skinny of hunger and thirst,” but, even in this diminished condition they were still dangerous, having committed 25 or 30 murders between them. They bore the promised supplies of laken and red wine. A party of Defenders came to meet them, and the bales of cloth were opened on the beach. While the men drank wine and passed samples of the cloth about, Wiebbe and Jeronimus conversed. The captain-general monopolized the negotiations, “deceiving [him] with many lies, saying he would harm none, that it had only been on account of the Water that he had fought against them, [and] that there was no need to distrust him because some had been killed.” While Hayes was thus occupied, however, Zevanck and the other mutineers were “walking hither and thither,” trying to strike up conversations with individual Defenders. As Cornelisz had instructed, they attempted to suborn Wiebbe’s men, promising them 6,000 guilders a man, and a share in the salvaged jewels, if they would change sides.
It proved to be a fatal mistake. The Defenders had anticipated treachery, and they were ready for it. Rather than listening to Zevanck and his companions, they fell upon them suddenly, and Jeronimus paid dearly for setting foot on Hayes’s Island without adequate protection. Hopelessly outnumbered, his bodyguard surrendered with hardly a fight. Cornelisz was taken prisoner and bound. Only Wouter Loos escaped, tearing himself free from his captors and making off in the mutineers’ skiff before he could be recaptured.
David Zevanck and his companions now had less than two minutes to live. A quarter of a mile away across a muddy channel, the remaining mutineers had realized too late what was happening. They seized their arms and made ready to attempt a rescue, but Hayes and his men saw them coming and backed away, dragging their new prisoners with them. As the Defenders reached their positions and turned to face another attack, Wiebbe took rapid stock of his situation. The advantage he had enjoyed in numbers had probably all but evaporated, for it must have required at least two men to guard each of the struggling mutineers and prevent their fleeing after Loos. Moreover, his enemies’ blood was up, and it would probably remain so while there was a chance for them to save their leaders. The logic was inescapable: he gave the order to kill the prisoners.
Jeronimus alone was spared; he was too important, both as a ringleader and a potential hostage, to be dispatched. But Zevanck, Coenraat van Huyssen, and Gsbert van Welderen were slaughtered where they stood, along with the unfortunate Cornelis Pietersz. The executions occurred in plain view of the other mutineers as they swarmed down to the beach of their little islet, and they had the desired effect. It was plain that the Defenders were well prepared to meet an attack, and any assault would only result in the death of Cornelisz himself. Shocked and demoralized by the unexpected turn of events, the remaining mutineers pulled back instead and retired in some confusion to Batavia’s Graveyard.
In the space of perhaps five minutes, the balance of power in the Abrolhos had shifted for good. The mutineers had lost their leader and his principal lieutenants, while Hayes had won the first real victory in the indecisive island civil war, immeasurably strengthening his men’s morale. The Defenders had secured the wine and clothing they had coveted, for the mutineers’ supplies had been abandoned on the beach when they were captured. Individual survivors were also affected by what had happened; Judick Gijsbertsdr, for instance, had lost both of her protectors; her father, left by chance among the loyalists by the swift collapse of his diplomacy, remained on Hayes’s Island, while her husband-manqué Coenraat, run through by Wiebbe Hayes’s nail-tipped pikes, lay dead on the beach.
Of all the Batavia’s people, none experienced a more dramatic reversal of fortune than Jeronimus Cornelisz. When he stepped ashore that day, the captain-general was the undisputed master of the survivors, gleefully wielding the power of life and death. His absurd costume of gold-trimmed laken had marked him as a man of great self-regard and consequence, compared with whom the ragged Defenders seemed to be no more than a rabble. Half an hour later, though, Cornelisz had at last experienced for himself something of the terror he had inflicted on Batavia’s Graveyard. He had been deposed, deprived of his authority, tightly bound, and no doubt harshly treated, too; worse, the aura of invincibility that had once surrounded him—and in which he himself certainly believed—had been unceremoniously stripped away.
The captain-general’s humiliation was compounded by the quarters that the Defenders found for him. For three months Jeronimus had dwelled in a large tent packed wit
h looted clothes and treasure, taking his pick of the salvaged food and drink. Now he was hurled into a limestone pit some way inland and made to help feed Hayes’s men. Into the hole the Defenders tossed the birds they caught, for their prisoner to pluck for them, and at the bottom lived Cornelisz, spattered with guts and feathers. For every nine birds that rained down on him, eight had to be surrendered to Wiebbe Hayes. The ninth he was allowed to keep, as “salary.”
Still smarting from the disastrous setback of 2 September, the remaining mutineers regrouped on Batavia’s Graveyard and elected a new leader. The only remaining member of Cornelisz’s council—Stone-Cutter Pietersz, the ineffectual and unpopular lance corporal—was passed over. In his place, the 32 survivors of the under-merchant’s band elected Wouter Loos.
Loos was a professional soldier who came from the southern Dutch town of Maastricht. He was considerably younger than Jeronimus, being about 24 years old, but unlike Cornelisz and his cohorts he did possess some military ability; this, in the aftermath of a devastating defeat, no doubt helps to explain his election. He had long been one of Cornelisz’s favorites and had participated in several murders, but unlike the captain-general he took no great pleasure in killing for its own sake. Under his command, the massacres on Batavia’s Graveyard ceased, and the remaining people on the island*44 ceased to live in constant terror of their lives.
Nevertheless, in most respects Wouter’s regime differed little from Jeronimus’s. Strict rationing remained in force. The women from the lower deck were still “kept for common service,” and Loos himself shared Creesje’s tent, though he would always insist that he had neither touched nor slept with her. Judick Gijsbertsdr was also treated well after her lover Coenraat’s death; that is, she was left alone, and no other mutineer was permitted to rape her.